Whether you’re new to the world of email marketing or a seasoned veteran spearheading your brand’s latest campaign, there’s one thing that always stays the same – good enough won’t get you very far. With so many companies offering great email content, resting on your laurels is a quick way to fall behind the pack when it comes to your email templates and message content. To help you avoid a campaign that falls flat on its face, here are some quick tips that can help ensure your templates and messages are responsive and evocative moving forward.

Avoid Multiple Columns When Possible

Starting off the list is the basic structure of your template. By skipping multiple columns and sticking with a single text column approach, you can standardize your templates and ensure consistency between your desktop and mobile variants, according to Andre Lejeune in an article on Chief Marketer. This approach comes from two different perspectives. First is the fact that multiple columns are often hard to render and read comfortably on a mobile screen. From here, your brand really can’t afford to disregard its mobile constituency, as all signs point to smartphone and tablet usage continuing its meteoric rise in relevancy. Because of this, the best plan of action is finding a happy medium between the two and a unified template that’s responsive on both platforms.

Placing Your CTA

With the single column approach, you can continue to build a powerful template by reserving premium screen space at the top of the template for the call-to-action (CTA.) As part of the responsive approach, it’s important to engage your readers quickly, lest they lose focus and click over to the next promotional message in the inbox. By putting the CTA button or blurb at the top of the template, you offer a high impact piece of content that supports the body of the message and piques the viewer’s interest to continue reading, eventually leading into potential conversion territory by having them visit your page. When compared to the old approach of sticking the CTA at the bottom of the message, it’s easy to see that keeping things upfront and straightforward is a more proactive way to illicit a response from your audience.

Understand the Size Constraints of Mobile Screens

Continuing with the mobile theme, it’s important to keep interactive design fluid on smartphone and tablet platforms. While your desktop templates might be full of nifty graphics and buttons, these additions often don’t translate well to the small screen, even if you’re using the one column approach. If you absolutely need graphics in your marketed messages, consider building in the option to hide this secondary content. As The Business Journals’ report on the subject explains, keeping load times down and emails brief is a smart way to boost the response from your targeted demographic.

In regard to buttons, navigating these waters can be a little trickier because hiding this interactive feature can marginalize your CTA. For the buttons on your mobile platform to function properly, use them sparingly when possible and provide ample space on the template between interactive features to help mitigate the risk of unintentional clicks. Not only will this keep your click rates honest, it’s also key to avoiding a frustrated set of readers that can’t properly navigate or use your marketed message.

Thinking In Sections

Outside of some of the technical considerations surrounding the responsive approach, it’s also important to understand the big picture design implications of this strategy. At the heart of a responsive template is the idea that messages and visuals separated by segments are far easier for your audience to enjoy and view. Whether it’s split into block sections of the column, or breakaways explaining related deals, having defined borders and positioning helps present a more palatable email for consumers who don’t have time to sift through a single block of text.

Reaping Your Rewards

Now that you’re an expert on bringing your templates up to speed with modern trends, it’s time to look at some of the benefits you can expect from making the switch to the responsive design approach. As Cara Olson of Marketing Land explains in her case study on responsive emails, messages that don’t render well on desktops and mobile devices due to improper design are deleted immediately 70 percent of consumers. On the flip side, responsive templates generate more views, clicks, and conversions when compared to traditional message layouts. From this perspective, and with the tools to build a great responsive template in hand, there’s no reason your brand should ever send out a bland marketed message again.

In a world where it seems like every minute detail of your marketing content is subject to unbelievably intense scrutiny and analysis, sometimes the simple question of “how does your email actually look to the customer?” goes unanswered. While the substance of what ends up in customer inboxes is definitely the primary focus of any great promotional email push, if you don’t wrap it up in a visually pleasing package, don’t be surprised when it ends up in the virtual trash bin. To help you avoid this advertising calamity, let’s delve into the world of color theory and see just how important picking the right shades on the palette really is to the success of your brand.

What Is Color Theory, Exactly?

Of course for those of you who decided against the arts major in college, bringing up color theory might as well be like asking you how much you know about astrophysics. Thankfully, it’s really not that complex once you get the hang of it. The basic gist of the concept is that a color wheel defines the harmony between the colors, which in turn affects how people, like the readers of your emails, react to these choices. From here, creating an understanding of the connections between all of the choices on the wheel can add an extra layer of appeal that puts your brand imagery and content over the top with your audience.

Finding Balance and Harmony in Selections

Digging a little deeper shows that selections made via color theory start with evaluating sequential hues and shades found on the wheel, before branching off into three different approaches. The first approach focuses on analogous colors, or colors that stand side by side on the 12-part basic color wheel. Generally, the selections come in threes, with one color taking center stage for a brand’s color overall or email oriented color scheme. Additionally, pairing complimentary colors – or colors that exist as direct opposites in placement on the wheel – is also a popular strategy.

Finally, it’s not unheard of to look to the natural world for a little guidance when picking a color scheme for your brand or upcoming email marketing initiative. This branch of color theory selection asserts that Mother Nature often comes up with the best or most visually striking combinations anyways, so why not take a page out her book and save yourself some time?

Is Color Theory Really That Important?

Now that you’re up to speed on how color theory works, the natural next step in the process is looking at why it works. At the heart of the argument for putting a little more thought into your color selections when creating promotional emails is the fact that 93 percent of customers claim that the visual appearance of a product or message is the top factor that goes into a successful marketing operations. On top of this, 80 percent noted that well designed and pleasing color selection increased brand recognition and visibility. Basically, if you can find the right colors for your brand and for your emails, you’re well on your way to hitting a home run with your customers.

Adding In a Little Psychology to the Mix

Aside from aesthetics, the selection for your next campaign can also send another, more subtle message to your viewers based on psychological tendencies connected to these colors. Yellow, red, and orange denote optimism, energy, and aggressiveness respectively, while green brings up elements of wealth and prosperity. On the other hand, purple and blue emphasize trust and security, with black representing new or sleek products. It’s important to note that these relationships coincide directly with North American consumers, and that different cultures and regions attribute varying characteristics to these same colors, so selections should take into account where your target audience resides.

Building a Strategy for Your Brand

The final piece to the puzzle comes with setting up a strategy that compliments and emphasizes what you’re messages have to offer to viewers. Naturally, there’s no universal selection that works for every brand, but you can build around general strategies that help refine your color selection based on what you’re trying to accomplish. For instance, retooling your entire brand image based on a more appealing color scheme isn’t a bad idea if you’re thinking long-term. Likewise, focusing on the next campaign and finding the colors that really compliment your promotional deals and products is just as worthwhile an endeavor. Regardless of how you approach the process, it’s hard to go wrong with retooling your brand and message look to create a stunning visual your audience can’t resist.

A lot of what you read on this blog offers advice and guidance for brands that have been around the block at least once when it comes to email marketing. While there’s nothing wrong with that, it might be a little hard to get you into the flow of things if this is your first time setting up an email marketing campaign. Once you’re in gear and up to speed with the latest trends and best practices, you’ll be able to really pull some value out of the rest of the content. For now, here’s a few quick tips that will help you skip the learning curve and make a great email template for your first run of marketed messages.

Simple Coding is the Way to Go

To start, let’s talk about the meat and potatoes of your template – the coding. While you might be a web design whiz who can turn random strings of characters into a beautiful webpage, that talent’s better suited for places outside of the email. Because of the varying platforms and coding accommodations of the different mail providers, simple coding that keeps things clean and tidy is your best bet. This means sticking to the basic tags and fonts, as well as testing out your emails in a “what you see is what you get” (sometimes referred to by the acronym WYSIWYG) setting. By following this line of thought, you’ll never have to hear back from potential customers who wanted to check out your latest email offers, but couldn’t because your message looked more like a bowl of alphabet soup than a potent marketing message.

Go Easy on the Vids and the Visuals

Keeping up with this theme is the concept of cutting down on the videos and images found in your email messages. Much like complex coding, these additions can look great when viewed on certain platforms, but can also go the other way and bog down an otherwise powerful message. Additionally, plenty of email users already have images turned off by default, so all they’ll be seeing is big empty spaces that could otherwise showcase some great text. To circumvent this dilemma and still get some solid use out of these visuals, drop them on your landing pages and social sites so that viewers who like what you’re offering in the email wind up seeing this content anyways.

Don’t Forget the Mobile Viewers

Another key technical feature you can’t forget about when prepping your first email template is that plenty of your audience is going to check out these messages on a smartphone or tablet. Naturally, these mobile viewers need a little extra attention to ensure they can actually view the message. This means taking into account the reduced screen sizes in your scaling coding and going light on the graphics and visuals as mentioned in the previous part of this post. Additionally, mobile landing pages are a must if you go this way to guarantee you can move these viewers from the inbox to your online store.

Keep These Words out of the Mix

Aside from the more techy stuff that goes in your template, the actual wording of your template makes a big difference as well. Some words might seem like a must in your message, but the reality of the situation is that all they do is turn your viewers off pretty quickly. “Final,” “donation,” “don’t,” and “tempting” all bring up some seriously negative responses in your audience. While getting your message across does require some strong wording at times, making the reader feel rushed or compelled to do something is not a smart marketing strategy. Keep it friendly and let your deals and offers speak for themselves.

Think Big Picture

The final point isn’t necessarily a “do or a don’t,” but rather a philosophy that can extend beyond marketed emails and into any outreach with customers and others in your industry. When building a template for communication, keeping the “Big Picture” in view should always be your top priority. While focusing on the coding and technical aspects of your message definitely opens up a pretty powerful channel to spread your message, if the message isn’t good, you’re not really accomplishing anything at all.

As you build your template and the accompanying message, try to look at it as if you were the audience. Does the message make sense? Do you understand what’s being offered and what you need to do to redeem this discount? If either of these questions have answers that are anything but an emphatic “yes,” it might be time to go back to the drawing board and rethink your approach. Although this doesn’t sound like much fun, you’ll be enjoying it later as you watch open and redemption rates go through the roof with a message that’s supported by a great email template.